Indonesia’s Worst Police Scandal Involves Christians. Leaders Assess the Implications.

Maria Fennita and Mellie Cynthia

As former police general Ferdy Sambo gets death sentence for murder coverup, four Christians reflect on how to live faithfully under corrupt authorities.

Rosti Simanjuntak (center), mother of late Brigadier Yosua Hutabarat, holds a picture of her son after former head of the internal affairs for Indonesia's national police Ferdy Sambo was sentenced to death during a verdict hearing in Jakarta.

Aditya Aji / Getty

For the past year, Indonesians have been fixated on a murder trial involving a high-level Christian police general. Last week, the South Jakarta District Court sentenced former police general Ferdy Sambo to death for ordering and covering up the murder of his bodyguard, Brigadier Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat, who Sambo claims sexually assaulted his wife.

Initially, Sambo claimed Hutabarat died in a shootout with the police general’s aide, Richard Eliezer, in his home. Yet Hutabarat’s family became suspicious after police attempted to stop them from viewing his body. Eliezer later admitted that he shot Hutabarat under direct orders from Sambo. Sambo then put a bullet into his bodyguard’s head, Eliezer said.

The murder case is considered the worst scandal in the history of the Indonesian police force and has deteriorated the public’s trust in the police. Dozens of police officers were involved in the cover-up and have since been dishonorably discharged. A poll from October 2022, during Sambo’s trial, found that public trust in the police had dropped to 53 percent from 80 percent a year earlier. Other incidents—including the police’s aggressive use of tear gas in the deadly soccer stadium stampede last October, police corruption cases, and a spate of extrajudicial killings—have led to widespread cynicism.

Complicating the matter, Sambo, Eliezer, and Hutabarat all happen to be Christians in the Muslim-majority country.

CT asked four Indonesian Christians how believers should respond when placed under corrupt authority, as in the case of Eliezer, and as citizens in a country where police scandals are common. They also discussed how the Sambo case impacts public perceptions of the police and Christians, as well as how Christians can rightly view the police and encourage accountability to combat abuse of power.

Lotnatigor Sihombing, lecturer in ethics and leadership at Amanat Agung Theological Seminary in Jakarta

As Christians, members of society, and citizens, we view the police as an instrument of the state that has authority. Therefore, police officers must obey the law in order to protect the people and give the public a sense of security. However, their rights and obligations must be balanced, as that is a basic form of justice. When they deviate from the authority given by the state, they must be held responsible for their actions as they have sworn an oath based on their religion and belief before God.

In the Bible, the sin most often mentioned is the violation of justice. Any sin is a violation of justice, be it distributive justice, vindictive justice, or legalist justice. Even in Ecclesiastes 3:16, it is written, “In the place of judgment—wickedness was there, in the place of justice—wickedness was there.” Therefore, Christian police officers, prosecutors, judges, and lawyers must truly fear God, the source of justice, and uphold justice. Likewise, Christians in any position should not become bribers and lawbreakers.

In Eliezer’s case, we can’t fully understand the position and situation he was in at the time. Later he collaborated with the police (known in Indonesia as a justice collaborator), a valuable decision that must be respected. It meant that Eliezer knew what he was doing was wrong. Killing is a wrong action because it negates and eliminates existence. The Lord created something from nothing, while killing annihilates what already exists. Therefore, killing is an act against God, an atheistic act. Of course, the fact that Sambo and Eliezer are Christians can make non-Christian people judge, “Wow, Christians or non-Christians—they’re all the same.” Indeed, we all need God’s grace.

Jesuit priest Franz Magnis-Suseno, philosopher, theologian, and an expert witness in Eliezer’s trial, in Jakarta

The murder of junior police officer Hutabarat by a high-ranking Indonesian police officer is one of the dirtiest police crimes in Indonesian history. The fact that both the victim and the accused are Christians is undoubtedly very embarrassing for Christians, although the media hasn’t commented much on this. It has reinforced public opinion that our police are corrupt. We need to expose and fight corruption in all dimensions.

Every human being is accountable for his or her actions, even those in leadership positions. We expect our leaders to be trustworthy, to put the common good before their interest, and to conscientiously obey the law. Leaders who break the law must be punished more harshly than ordinary citizens.

In the case of Eliezer, the obligation to obey orders ends when what is commanded is evil. This is one of the most fundamental moral norms that an evil command must never be obeyed. The Nazi slogan “Befehl ist Befehl (An order is an order)” was deeply immoral. However, when Eliezer still carried out the order to shoot Hutabarat, it does not suffice to pronounce Eliezer guilty. As a young officer, he was educated in the police culture of unquestioningly obeying the direct commands of high-ranking officers. Without any opportunity to think or talk it over, Eliezer’s legal and moral culpability may be close to zero.

Tiurma M. Pitta Allagan, lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Indonesia in Jakarta

The police force is an instrument of the state assigned to serve the community. Without making any distinction whether the police are Christians or not, we should see them as sinful humans. It means that even the police can make mistakes because they are not free from sin. As public officials, they need the prayers of the saints to survive and protect the interests of Christians and other minority religions. The greater a person’s responsibility, the greater the accountability demanded. The responsibility of police officers is not only to adhere to the written rules but also to the norms and morals observed in the society they serve.

Eliezer’s actions are difficult to evaluate because of his position as a submissive police officer within a special division led by Sambo. He has received training as a police officer in the internal affairs division of the Indonesian National Police, where the ethics and rules integrated into his heart and mind are distinct from most people’s. I’m also not sure that he became a justice collaborator because he is a Christian. But I see that his conscience is still awake. In this case, Eliezer’s conscience coincides with Christian values. No one will ever know whether these considerations were due to Eliezer’s Christian values, except him and God.

We can support accountability and transparency by working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the ombudsman or writing a research article about this case. Hopefully, we can view Sambo’s case as a warning that officials are sinful human beings. Staying in the top ranks and protecting the interests of the Indonesian people, including the interests of Christians, is not easy.

Yakub Tri Handoko, founder of the Indonesian Apologetics Movement (API) and Grace Alone Ministry (GRAMI), lecturer, pastor at the Reformed Exodus Community (REC) in Surabaya

Every Christian should take any sin seriously. Love and forgiveness should never be used as an excuse to overlook misconduct. The gospel isn’t only about grace but also about the truth (John 1:14). Justice should be served.

Any public misconduct committed by a high-profile Christian will surely cast a bad impression on Christianity. It is especially true in the context of Indonesia as a Muslim-majority nation. I think our society will associate the murder case more with the police culture in Indonesia as it’s no longer a secret that corruption is rampant in this institution. However, it will undoubtedly reduce the persuasive power of Christianity. It’s unsurprising that for some people and in some contexts, evangelism is more difficult than ever.

Eliezer’s case is very unfortunate. He was under enormous pressure. No one should oversimplify the situation he found himself in. However, fear of leaders should not hinder our obedience to God. Respect for leaders doesn’t mean blind loyalty.

When a leader forces us to perform certain actions that contradict the moral law in our hearts or the teachings of the Bible, we have the right to disobey. The apostles taught us that we must be more obedient to God than to other people. Several faith heroes from the Old Testament also provide good examples, such as Daniel and his friends or the prophet Elijah. Risks and dangers are often inevitable for followers of Christ.

Christians should speak out about the urgency for more serious efforts to prevent abuse of power. Church leaders should also make their congregations aware that abuse of power occurs in various forms, even in homes and churches. Local churches should deliberately make their churches safe for everyone from abuse of power. In short, we should be more active in pursuing justice in various contexts.

In the end, the truth of God’s Word from Acts 5:29 serves as a reminder that resonates loudly for us: “We must obey God rather than human beings!”

With reporting assistance by Ivan K. Santoso.

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Theology

Parkinson’s—The Gift I Didn’t Want

Philip Yancey

I’ve spent years writing about pain and suffering. Now I’ll spend years learning how to live with physical disability.

Joe Amon/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images / Edits by CT

In my memoir, Where the Light Fell, I tell the saga of my older brother, in whose shadow I grew up. Marshall was blessed with an off-the-charts IQ and preternatural musical gifts, including absolute pitch and an auditory memory that enabled him to play any music he’d ever heard.

Everything changed in 2009 when a stroke cut off blood flow to his brain. One day he was playing golf; two days later he lay in an ICU ward, comatose.

Only a rare type of brain surgery saved Marshall’s life, and thus began his new identity as a disabled person. In a reprise of childhood, it took him a year to learn to walk and more years to speak sentences longer than a few words. He plugged away, working with a useless right arm and a speech condition called aphasia. Now he proudly wears a T-shirt that says “Aphasia: I know what to say but I can’t say it.”

From my brother, I learned the challenges of disability. The vexation of being unable to get words out. The indignity of needing help with simple activities like taking a shower and getting dressed. The paranoia of knowing friends were making decisions about him behind his back.

In public, strangers averted their gaze, as if he did not exist. Only children were forthright. “Mom, what’s wrong with that man?” they’d say before being shushed; bolder ones approached his wheelchair directly to ask, “Can’t you walk?”

The frustrations grew so great that Marshall researched how many Valium and Ambien pills it would take for him to kill himself, then downed them all with a quart of whiskey. His suicide attempt failed, thank God, and he ended up in a psych ward. Since then, he has gradually rebuilt his life, aided by many hours of therapy, and now manages to live on his own and drive an adapted car.

A year ago, while skiing in Colorado, I gave clear instructions for my legs to turn downhill, and they disobeyed. Instead, I slammed into a tree, breaking my boot and ski and badly bruising my left calf. Strange. My brain had given orders, and the legs simply ignored them.

Over the next few months, other symptoms appeared. My walking gait and posture changed. My handwriting, already small, grew even tinier and sloppier. Some nights I had mild hallucinations while sleeping. I made many more mistakes when typing on a computer keyboard. My miserable golf game became even worse. I mentioned one possibility to my primary care physician, who replied, “You’re in great shape, Philip. You can’t have Parkinson’s disease.” (Always get a second opinion.)

By last fall, I was living in a time warp. Tasks like buttoning a shirt took twice as long. I felt as if some slow-moving, uncoordinated alien had invaded my body. When other people began noticing, I knew I had to get checked out medically.

In my insurance network, no neurologist was available for six months. So I changed insurance plans to one with a wider network and leaned on a friend to get me into her state-of-the-art facility connected with a university. Last month they confirmed a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease that disrupts connections between brain and muscles. I began a dopamine-based treatment along with physical therapy.

As I informed a few close friends, I feared that now I had acquired a new label: not just Philip but Philip-with-Parkinson’s. That’s how people would see me, think of me, and talk about me.

I wanted to insist, “I’m still the same person inside, so please don’t judge me by externals such as slowness, stumbling, and occasional tremors.” In fact, I coined a new word—dislabeled—in protest. I had seen others judge my brother by his cane and withered arm and shyness to speak, unaware of the complex and courageous human being who exists behind the screen of those externals.

Then, less than a week after my diagnosis, reality forced its way in. As if to prove nothing had really changed, I decided to try the new sport of pickleball, kind of a cross between tennis and Ping-Pong. Within five minutes I dove for a ball, stumbled, and pitched forward. Any reflex to break my fall kicked in too late, and I landed face-first on the hard surface.

Waiting in a packed emergency room for eight hours, I realized that I had undeniably joined the motley crew of injured and disabled people who visit such a place on a Wednesday night. I’m not dislabeled after all.

From now on, I will be making adjustments. No more leaping from boulder to boulder on one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains. No more kamikaze runs on a mountain bike. Ice skating? Probably not. And definitely no more pickleball!

In a compressed preview of aging, disability means letting go of ordinary things that we take for granted. I shouldn’t even climb stairs without using a handrail, and walking is my safest form of exercise—as long as I pick my feet up and don’t shuffle. Just as I’ve had to slow my pace when walking alongside my brother, now others must slow their pace for me.

A friend who heard my news sent me a reference to Psalm 71, which leads with these words: “In you, Lord, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame.”

Although the poet wrote in very different circumstances—harassed by human enemies rather than a nerve disease—the words “let me never be put to shame” jumped out at me. Other psalms (see 25, 31, and 34) repeat the odd phrase.

A measure of shame seems to accompany disability. There is an innate shame in inconveniencing others for something that is neither your fault nor your desire. And a shame in having well-meaning friends overreact—some may treat you like a fragile antique and complete your sentences when you pause a second to think of a word.

Though still experiencing only mild symptoms, already I anticipate shame over how these may worsen: drooling, memory gaps, slurred speech, hand tremors. Warning sign: The other day I opened a newsletter and mistakenly read “Daily Medication” instead of “Daily Meditation.”

Shame can sometimes goad to action. After my diagnosis, six friends wrote that they had observed something unsound about me but didn’t mention it. Only two risked being as blatantly honest as a child. During a restaurant dinner, one said to me, “Have you got the slows, Philip?”—earning a look of reproof from his wife. Another, more blunt, asked, “Why are you walking like a decrepit old man?” Those two comments spurred me to intensify my search for a neurologist.

“Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone,” Psalm 71 adds. That prayer expresses the silent plea of all disabled persons, a group that now includes me. The CDC calculates that 26 percent of the US population qualifies as disabled. Now that I have joined them, I try to look past the externals—as I do instinctively with my brother—to the person inside.

In the first month of my own acknowledged disability, I have become more self-conscious, which can be both good and bad. I do need to pay close attention to my body and my moods, especially as I adapt to medication and learn my physical limitations. I need to find a safe and challenging exercise routine. Yet I don’t want to obsess over one part of my life or let this disease define me.

Time magazine recently ran an essay by a disability activist who has written a book on “Disability Pride.” A newly vocal generation wears the disabled label as a badge of honor. Members of the deaf community, for example, scorn such euphemisms as “hearing impaired” and refuse medical procedures that might restore their hearing.

In contrast, I admit I would be delighted to have Parkinson’s magically removed from my life. I would hold a pill bonfire, cancel my order for a cane, and dust off my climbing gear. However, I don’t have that option—and perhaps the disability activists are simply focusing on accepting the reality that some things can’t be changed.

Although I still cringe at the awkward euphemism “differently abled,” I better understand it now. The phrase points to the fact that life is patently unfair and that people are unequal in their abilities. My brother was once able to play piano concertos while I was still struggling to master scales. Compared to Tom Brady or Venus Williams, we’re all athletically disabled. And though Parkinson’s may eliminate some of my favorite physical activities, I can enjoy others that a quadriplegic may envy.

No two human beings have the same set of abilities, intelligence, appearance, and family backgrounds. We can respond to that inequity with resentment—or somehow learn to embrace the gifts and “disabilities” unique to ourselves.

In my writing career, I have interviewed US presidents, rock stars, professional athletes, actors, and other celebrities. I have also profiled leprosy patients in India, pastors imprisoned for their faith in China, women rescued from sex trafficking, parents of children with rare genetic disorders, and many who suffer from diseases far more debilitating than Parkinson’s.

Reflecting on the two groups, here’s what stands out: With some exceptions, those who live with pain and failure tend to be better stewards of their life circumstances than those who live with success and pleasure. Pain redeemed impresses me much more than pain removed.

This latest twist in my life involves a disease that could prove incapacitating or perhaps a mere inconvenience; Parkinson’s has a wide spectrum of manifestations. How should I prepare?

I was privileged to know Michael Gerson, a Washington Post columnist and White House speechwriter who lived with Parkinson’s for years before succumbing to cancer. A colleague said of him, “At the peak of his career, he used his influence to care for the most vulnerable, spearheading the campaign to address AIDS in Africa. When he was at his lowest point physically, he never complained but focused on gratitude for the life he had lived.”

That is my prayer. After a bumpy childhood, I’ve had a rich, full, and wonderful life with more pleasure and fulfillment than I ever dreamed or deserved. I have an omnicompetent wife of 52 years who takes my health and well-being as a personal challenge.

Sixteen years ago, when I lay strapped to a backboard with a broken neck after an auto accident, Janet drove through a blizzard to retrieve me. Already she was mentally redesigning our house in case she needed to prepare for life with a paralytic. She shows that same selfless, fierce loyalty now, even as she faces the potentially demanding role of caregiving.

My future is full of question marks, and I’m not unduly anxious. I have excellent medical care and support from friends. I trust a good and loving God who often chooses to reveal those qualities through his followers on earth.

I have written many words on suffering and now am being called to put them into practice. May I be a faithful steward of this latest chapter.

Philip Yancey is the author of many books including, most recently, the memoir Where the Light Fell.

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Church Life

Rupert Clarke: The Medical Missionary on the Tibetan Plateau

Xuan Ji-ren

The British doctor established hospitals for Tibetans and called on Chinese Christians to care for the souls of the ethnic group.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In the early 20th century, the gates of Tibet were still tightly shut to Christian missionaries.

The people who lived across the Tibetan Plateau were devout believers in Tibetan Buddhism. One out of every four adult males was a lama (monk). At that time in history, infectious diseases such as syphilis, leprosy, smallpox, plague, and diphtheria were rampant. Due to the lack of medical care, the only method of prevention was to isolate the sick, even to the point of casting them out of the community for life.

A good number of missionaries from the China Inland Mission (CIM) hoped to share the gospel with Tibetans. But because they could not enter Tibet, they could reach Tibetans only through neighboring provinces. As early as 1918, missionaries Harry French Ridley and Frank D. Learner began spreading the gospel in Qinghai Province. By the end of the 1940s, there were an estimated 200 believers in eastern Qinghai, but few to no Tibetans among them.

That would eventually change. Also in the 1940s, a CIM missionary served in medical missions among the Tibetans in Gansu and Qinghai Provinces: the English medical doctor Rupert Clarke.

During Clarke’s youth, he often stayed at his grandmother’s Victorian manor, where the family would gather several times a day for prayer and where attending church on Sunday was a given. Although biblical knowledge filled young Clarke’s mind and he lived in a rule-abiding manner, he lacked the assurance of salvation in his heart.

This continued until he attended university and joined a Christian fellowship. There he met fellow students Robert A. Pearce and James Cecil Pedley. Pearce and Pedley felt that while Clarke had the appearance of being a Christian, he had not tasted the joy of salvation, so they often prayed for him. When Clarke read one of the books they lent him, he finally realized that the assurance of salvation rests on God’s promises, not on human efforts. What he needed was trust in Jesus. He knelt by the bedside and welcomed Jesus into his heart with Revelation 3:20. He never looked back.

Clarke went on to study in medical school. During the summer of his third year, he contracted mumps that confined him to bed in his grandmother’s home. During that time he read the book A Thousand Miles of Miracle in China, which details the dangerous trek of the Glover family, missionaries who were taken from Shanxi to Shanghai during the Boxer Rebellion. Clarke was deeply moved and began to care about the needs of people in China.

Lanzhou Hospital

Pearce and Pedley joined the CIM in 1931 and 1935 respectively and served in the Lanzhou Hospital of Gansu as well as the affiliated leper hospital. Many of the Tibetans in the leper hospital came to believe in Jesus. The two missionaries continually wrote to encourage Clarke, and his burden for the Tibetans deepened daily. Finally, Clarke joined CIM’s Tibetan medical missions team and went to serve in Lanzhou, Gansu Province.

By 1941, Clarke’s work in the Lanzhou Hospital was making progress. In the same year, the CIM invited him to join the work of the medical missionary team in Zhongwei, which was five days’ travel into the neighboring province of Ningxia. Clarke arrived in Zhongwei but had come down with severe hepatitis and was yellow all over. The CIM immediately sent nurse Jeannette Barbour to take care of Clarke.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

China Inland Mission workers in Tatsienlu in 1898.

Barbour was born in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and trained as a nurse in Edinburgh, Scotland. She had just recently joined CIM at the time. Under Barbour’s careful care, Clarke quickly began improving but had to remain in Zhongwei as he recovered. A month later he was healthy enough to bike back to Lanzhou. By then, he had already quietly become engaged to Barbour, though they had to wait to marry until she had served a full two years and passed her language exams according to CIM rules. On January 14, 1943, the two held their wedding in Lanzhou, by the shores of the iced-over Yellow River.

In 1944, after the end of World War II, Clarke was in charge of CIM’s hospital in Lanzhou city. At the end of 1946, the couple returned to England and South Africa on home assignment, and CIM sent Alfred James Broomhall to take over the medical work in Lanzhou.

Many Tibetans sought medical care at the Lanzhou Hospital and the affiliated leper hospital, and large numbers of them had to travel for weeks and even months. Han Chinese were generally unwilling to share a room with Tibetans, so the hospital set up wards specifically for Tibetans. The records of 1947 show that at least 80 Tibetans stayed at the hospital. Patients who required long-term care were often transferred to standard wards, and some of them had to stay for months. The Tibetans who were accepted and received medical care were thankful, but no missionary was available to share the gospel with them in the Tibetan language.

Hualong Medical Station

For many years, the CIM had planned to open a small hospital in Qinghai Province so the Tibetans spread across Qinghai could hear the gospel. In 1948, Clarke sent out a plea to his supporters back in the UK: Because of the lack of medical staff, the plan for a Qinghai hospital was on hold, and he was praying and planning fervently for God to send workers from the East and the West to serve the Tibetans.

In early 1948, Clarke returned to China after home assignment, but CIM was still unable to open the Qinghai hospital due to a lack of workers and resources. Right at that time, the board of the Holy Light School received aid from the “China Aid Team” and gifted the Lanzhou Hospital a large number of medical supplies left by the American military, allocating three tons of supplies to Hualong in Qinghai Province. CIM immediately reassigned workers and sent a local doctor as well as four nurses to the medical work in Qinghai Province. Clarke’s dream of many years to set up a medical station at Hualong was finally realized.

Hualong lies south of Xining city, near the boundaries of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces. It sits 10,000 feet above sea level and has thin air. The ground is unfrozen only four months of the year, and only in August is there no snow. For Clarke, transportation was challenging, but he was optimistic, adaptable, and unfazed by obstacles. Nothing was too difficult for him. On one occasion, his car’s fuel pump broke down. Clarke pulled his stethoscope out of his medical bag, held the gas can on top of the car, and guided the gas through the tube of the stethoscope and into the engine. The car was fixed, and he could continue on his way.

On July 5, 1948, Hualong Clinic officially opened. Dignified Buddhist lamas and monks and influential Muslim imams lived among the people in Hualong. Clarke and his fellow workers began handing out gospel tracts in Chinese and Arabic in the city.

In 1949, Rupert and Jeannette, who was pregnant with their first baby, moved and settled in Hualong. The couple was of the same mind—unafraid of hardships, all for the sake of serving the Lord of their lives and the Tibetans whom they loved.

They grew the clinic into a facility that they named Holy Light Hospital, with 20 beds. That same year, they saw as many as 3,590 patients and performed 160 surgeries. Jeannette held their newborn son, Humphrey, in one hand and carried out her nursing duties with the other.

Word of the hospital and Clarke spread far and wide. People said, “This foreign doctor is very good to Tibetans, treating them the way he treats Han Chinese.” Sometimes traveling for weeks, Tibetans and lamas came on horses, on yaks, or on foot in large groups to seek medical treatment. When they arrived at the hospital, they would hear the gospel for the first time, undergo surgery, recover, and joyfully return home with a New Testament or gospel pamphlets.

The beds were often full. Sometimes patients had to leave before they were fully recovered to make space for more seriously ill people flooding in. There were simply not enough beds. Up to 20 or 30 patients might be squeezed on the heated brick bed reserved for the relatives. But Clarke thought that serving Tibetans was “a great deal” because they had a strong will to live and were grateful. Clarke particularly hoped that Han Chinese Christians would join in sharing the gospel as well. In the 1950 issue of CIM’s China’s Millions journal, Clarke wrote:

What excited Clarke even more was that a clan in the mountains of Tibet had sent someone to visit and invited him to start a hospital where they lived. They even promised to supply a house and everything he might need. Naturally Clarke was ready to go right away, but it was not to be.

Evacuating from China

In December 1950, under dire circumstances, CIM’s leadership decided to fully withdraw from China. By January 1952, only 33 of CIM’s 620 missionaries remained stranded in China, including the Clarke family.

In June 1951, Chinese officials charged Clarke in Hualong court with many crimes, the most severe of which was being a spy for Western countries. Of course, Clarke firmly denied this. His wife and children were permitted to leave, but the officials imprisoned Clarke and confiscated the Bible in his bag. Yet he quietly sang, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Over 40 prisoners—many of them Muslim—filled the cell, and there was nowhere to sit but the ground.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Traveler on the Tibetan Plateau.

Clarke was later released but held under house arrest in Hualong Hospital, cut off from the outside world. To keep his body and mind strong, he insisted on walking three miles daily in the hospital courtyard, along with a weekly ten-mile walk, so that if he should be released one day, he would have the strength to walk to Xining. Clarke was later transferred to Xining and held at CIM’s missionary center.

In the afternoon of July 20, 1953, Clarke and Robert Arthur Mathews (another CIM missionary in northern China serving Mongolian people) arrived in Hong Kong by train and were the last two CIM missionaries to leave China. Arnold J. Lea, overseas director of CIM, wrote the following conclusion in the 1951 issue of China’s Millions:

The Communist government shut down the Hualong Hospital in 1950, marking the end of the missionary era to evangelize the Tibetans in Gansu and Qinghai. However, in the same year, two CIM couples (George and Dorothy Bell of Canada and Norman and Amy McIntosh of New Zealand) baptized two Tibetan women “who possessed a true faith in Jesus Christ.” Then Tibetans in India reported the joyful news that a group of Chinese Han Christians shared the gospel with Tibetans in Labrang (a Tibetan town in southern Gansu), “resulting in 20 professions of faith.”

In today’s China, reaching the Tibetan people with the gospel is still extremely difficult and sensitive. But more Han Christians are involved in evangelizing diaspora Tibetans in Chinese provinces outside Tibet. It is our prayer that the Spirit that inspired Rupert Clarke doubly inspires Chinese Han Christians today and that they will take the baton to share Christ’s love to Tibetans.

Translation by Christine Emmert

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‘Pray for the End of the Dictatorship’: The Cries of Myanmar’s Christians

Angela Lu Fulton

Pleas to God for unity, justice, and the strength to survive.

A protester makes a three-finger salute in front of a row of riot police, who are holding roses given to them by protesters.

Getty Images / Stringer

In the two years since the military coup in Myanmar began, the junta has killed nearly 3,000 of its own people and burned more than 100 villages. Fighting between the civilian People ’s Defense Forces and Myanmar ’s powerful army has intensified. The nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement and protests shuttered hospitals, schools, universities, and companies. Thousands of people lost their jobs as foreign companies left amid the turmoil. Food and medicine shortages have become part of everyday life.

“We have been facing financial, physical, spiritual, mental, and political struggles each day in Myanmar,” said KH, a pastor in Yangon. Many in Mynamar, also known as Burma, feel forgotten as the world ’s attention has moved on.

CT asked four Christians in Myanmar and in the Burmese diaspora to share both a Bible verse that has helped them persevere and their prayer requests. Two chose not to provide their names due to security concerns.

An exiled Christian scholar from Myanmar

The Bible verse helping him persevere:

Romans 5:1–11—Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. …

Paul walked through many difficult things in his life, but in whatever condition he was in, he never lost hope. Even during the challenges he had in prison or during his missionary journey, he never lost hope in an unfailing God. Since I started facing government persecution, this text has helped me when I have faced suffering.

Paul’s words have also helped me to reflect on the experiences of Christians in our country. The Japanese came during World War II and persecuted ethnic Karen Christians, but those early Christians survived. Our country has been under military rule since 1962 and Christians faced many challenges, but they overcame them. When I read this passage and remember our past history, that helps me remain hopeful despite everything. We will overcome with the help of God.

What this Christian scholar is praying for:

• Two pastors I know who are in prison. One is sentenced to 23 years in prison, and the other is in custody and will be sentenced very soon.

• Thantlang, a town in Chin State in northwestern Myanmar where many Christians lived. It has been reduced to rubble after the military attacked the town multiple times, as it was a symbol of resistance. About 15 churches have been burned to the ground. The 10,000 residents now live in makeshift camps in the border region by India. Many people have died from depression and trauma. Pray for God to give them the strength to survive.

• My country, which has been under brutal military rule for half a century. This time people from all backgrounds want to end the horror of military rule. Please pray for people who lost their loved ones and those who live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Pray for the end of the dictatorship.

KH, a pastor, seminary professor, and church planter in Yangon

The Bible verse helping him persevere:

Psalm 121—I lift up my eyes up to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. … The Lord will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.

This verse has blessed me and my church in the midst of suffering. Our help comes from God who created the heavens and the earth. We ask him for help whenever we are in need. As he has promised us, he always answers our prayers. He is our God, our shelter, our protector, and our provider. He is with us in our sickness, suffering, and shortages. He knows our needs and hears our prayers.

Psalm 121 has been helping me face this depressing situation and struggles. It gives me comfort and joy even in the valley of death, knowing that God will surely bless us and deliver us from our suffering.

What he’s praying for:

• Continued opportunities to share the gospel among Buddhist communities. Due to the chaos and suffering in Myanmar, Buddhists are more receptive to the gospel of Jesus Christ because the military did not respect the teaching of Buddhism in their brutality toward the people. We conducted four gospel seminars last December among Buddhist communities. We shared with them the hope and peace we have in Christ Jesus who came to suffer for us and with us and who has delivered us from the suffering caused by sin in the world.

• God ’s provision for our financial needs to buy groceries and medicine. Inflation in the country is so high that we are always struggling to meet our daily needs. Pray also for the education fees of my children. Many government schools are partially closed, so we are praying for God to provide the means to send our children to private schools.

• Families in our church who are struggling to provide and lacking food as they have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the coup.

David Moe, expert on Buddhist nationalism, ethnic conflict, and reconciliation at Yale University, originally from Chin State

The Bible verse helping him persevere:

Psalm 23—The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. … Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

As a Christian, I always believe that in the midst of troubles and challenges, Jesus Christ is with me. I always see Jesus Christ as the Shepherd who is beside us, before us, behind us, within us. It strengthens my life in the midst of these troubles and challenges.

We are his sheep; he knows what we need. As a shepherd, he is our protector and provider. He gives us strength and shows us the way, even though we can ’t see the future. Passing through this valley of darkness and troubles, Jesus Christ is with me and I am with him.

What he’s praying for:

• Give thanks to God for protecting and strengthening those who are fighting the coup on the ground. Two years of fighting is never easy. It ’s not just protesting an unjust government, but they are protesting against the military who have weapons and are killing them and burning their houses. But they ’re still strong and they ’re still brave to resist them. God is with them, and that is a good thing.

• The families of those fighting. Although they are not fighting on the front lines, they are also not safe. Pray that God will provide what they need since the situation is now entering civil war. These people are not coming back [home]; they will fight until they die.

• Unity among Christian ethnic minorities and people who resist the military regime

• God ’s justice, peace, and reconciliation will prevail in Myanmar.

Dave Eubank, director of Free Burma Rangers, currently in Karenni State

The Bible verse helping him persevere:

Romans 8:31—If God is for us, who can be against us?

This verse is so important anywhere in life, but it meant a lot to me in Burma because the Burma military is coming in with a speed and force we’ve never seen before. They are executing children and bombing churches—just this month a church very close to us here was bombed in Shan State.

In spite of the evil we see happening in Burma, we also see good. In our ministry of helping people with humanitarian assistance, we also have the opportunity to share about Jesus. We baptized 11 of our new Rangers this last training.

We start and end every program with prayer and an encouragement for people to follow Jesus. This has been a great opportunity to share this with people in need. There’s over 300,000 displaced people in Karenni State alone and currently more than 3 million newly displaced people since the coup.

What he’s praying for:

• Unity in Burma. Not just the current unity that cuts across religious, social, spiritual, racial, and economic lines and is united against the regime. That’s good, but the second step of unity is being for each other and for a new democratic Burma where every ethnic group is respected and has rights.

• The resources to help people. We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just in the last month trying to feed and shelter these people in Karenni State. The numbers are immense. And as opposed to the outpouring and helping Ukraine and recently in Turkey for the earthquake, very little help comes in here.

• The dictators’ hearts would change or they would fall.

Below is a video of ethnic Chin and Mizo Christians singing “We Are the World” to bring awareness to the situation in Myanmar.

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

News

Wire Story

Latino Evangelicals Ask DeSantis to Spare the Life of a Man on Death Row

Alejandra Molina - Religion News Service

“We believe in life at all levels and in all circumstances.”

The Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida, where Dillbeck is on death row and scheduled to be executed.

Matt McClain / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Latino evangelical leaders are calling on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to stay the execution of Donald David Dillbeck, who was convicted of fatally stabbing a woman after escaping from custody while serving a life sentence for killing a Lee County deputy.

Dillbeck’s attorneys have argued that his neurobehavioral disorder—which they say is similar to an intellectual disability and related to alcohol exposure before birth—should exempt him from execution under constitutional law, according to news reports.

Latino Christian leaders, as part of their faith-led effort dubbed “Evangélicos for Justice,” are urging the governor—who signed Dillbeck’s death warrant on January 23—to consider his disability and to offer him clemency. By enacting the death penalty on Dillbeck, they say, the state is undermining “our values and respect for all life.”

Dillbeck, who was convicted in the 1990 murder of Faye Vann in Tallahassee, is scheduled to die February 23 by lethal injection.

“As pastors and Christian leaders, we do believe all life is sacred, the life of victims and their oppressors. We want justice for everyone, which is why we believe that Donald Dillbeck should spend the remainder of his days in prison. We also believe that his life should be spared,” according to a letter on the “Evangélicos for Justice” website addressed to DeSantis.

Among those who signed the letter are Bishop Angel Marcial, president of the Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Councils and Evangelical Institutions; the Rev. Irene Familia, president of the Pastors Association of Volusia County; and the Rev. Ivan García, president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Ministers of Tampa. Signers also included Black clergy leaders, such as Bishop Derrick L. McRae, president of the African American Council of Christian Clergy, and the Rev. Frank Madison Reid III, with the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Agustin Quiles, with the Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Bishops and Evangelical Institutions, is part of the campaign and said Latino evangelicals are denouncing the execution because “we value life, from the womb to the tomb.”

Florida Department of Corrections

Donald David Dillbeck

Marcial noted the importance of their Latino evangelical effort advocating for Dillbeck, who is white. Latino evangelicals should use their “prophetic voice” for Dillbeck because “we are committed to life,” Marcial told Religion News Service.

Dillbeck is “in need of an act of mercy” considering his upbringing and diagnosis, Marcial said.

“We believe in life at all levels and in all circumstances,” he added.

To Celeste Fitzgerald, who for years has advocated against the death penalty, seeing Latino and Black leaders rallying behind Dillbeck speaks “to the history of the death penalty.”

The death penalty is not a “punishment of the wealthy,” or the “worst of the worst,” said Fitzgerald, of Florida. It’s a punishment, she said, “we reserve for the poor, for people who are marginalized … for the most broken and traumatized.”

In 2016, 78.5 percent of Americans serving life sentences in federal prison were people of color, according to a 2019 report from the Center for American Progress.

“I think people in the Black and brown communities, they feel that and they’re speaking up more and more,” said Fitzgerald, who served as director of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “You can’t really take the death penalty out of the context of the criminal justice system.”

Evangélicos for Justice also stands in opposition to a pair of bills in the Florida Legislature that aim to strip away the requirement of unanimous jury recommendations before death sentences can be imposed.

Marcial said that, if passed, this legislation would set the state back. “It will hurt a lot of people, especially the humble and the poor” who do not have means to defend themselves, he said.

Evangélicos for Justice joins organizations such as Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Amnesty International, and the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops in calling for Dillbeck’s stay of execution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

- More from Alejandra Molina - Religion News Service

Books

Review

Beware Drawing Bright Lines Between Evangelical and Ecumenical Protestants

Heath W. Carter

The divisions between these “parties” are important. So are the divisions within them.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Unsplash / Lightstock

Jesus’ caution in Luke 12:2, “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known,” certainly proved prescient in the case of white evangelicals. Oceans of ink have been spilled on nearly every facet of their existence, while recitations of their sins have become a daily ritual on social media. The scrutiny is so intense that it is easy to forget it is a relatively new phenomenon, especially among scholars.

Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular

David A. Hollinger (Author)

Princeton University Press

216 pages

There was rising interest in evangelicalism in the 1980s and 1990s, amid the heyday of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. Over the course of those decades, a cohort of evangelical historians, led by the likes of George Marsden and Mark Noll, salvaged their tradition from the academic dustheap. Having set out with the relatively modest goal of identifying “gold among the dross,” in Marsden’s choice turn of phrase, they ended up rewriting the history of Christianity in the United States, with evangelicalism as the throughline.

This entailed rehabilitating the fundamentalists, whose pugnaciousness was excessive, to be sure, but also understandable given the extent of early-20th-century liberal Protestants’ assault on Christian orthodoxy. The neo-evangelicals fared better in this revised story too. While the worlds that developed around Billy Graham exhibited serious flaws—with anti-intellectualism and jingoistic nationalism at the top of the list—they at least resisted the temptation to bend Christian doctrine to fit contemporary whims. With the mainline on a long and well-intentioned slide into de facto apostasy, evangelicals were the truest heirs of a Protestant lineage stretching back through Jonathan Edwards and the Puritans to the Reformation itself.

These revisions were dramatic and yet escaped the notice of many in the wider historical guild, which tended to view religious history as a strange niche and largely irrelevant to the main plotlines. The election and reelection of President George W. Bush underscored just how wrong that presumption was. To their credit, if United States historians were initially baffled by the “values voters” powering the Right’s resurgence, they did not sit idly by. Evangelicals soon began appearing as key actors in wider political and economic and cultural histories.

Scholars who did not hop on this bandwagon in the early going could hardly resist after the 2016 election, when Donald Trump prevailed by a razor-thin margin, and thanks in no small part to 81 percent of white evangelical voters. The deluge of scholarship on evangelicalism in the past two decades has been much more critical than the smaller vein that came before, and yet has only amplified the sense that this particular Christian tradition stands at the center of the American story.

A salvage operation

Enter David Hollinger, an eminent intellectual historian, who throughout our evangelical-obsessed age has written voluminously and brilliantly on “the other Protestants,” by which he means especially, though not exclusively, “Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Northern Baptists, Disciples of Christ, several Lutheran bodies, and a handful of smaller Calvinist and Anabaptist confessions.”

These folks have often been called “mainline,” but as Hollinger relates in his latest book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, he prefers the adjective “ecumenical.” In his view, this term better captures “a religious quality that is essential to their distinctive character: a willingness to cooperate in ecclesiastical, civic, and global affairs with a great variety of groups that professed to be Christian, and many that did not.” In his younger days Hollinger was an ecumenical Protestant himself, who enjoyed tangling with Southern Baptists in theological debate. “I later drifted away from the faith,” he relates in the preface, “but retained a feel for it that I hope informs this book.”

Christianity’s American Fate is at once accessible and erudite, weighing in at a lean 199 pages and yet packing a formidable analytical punch. Hollinger touches on a wide range of issues, from how the country became so Protestant in the first place to the underappreciated impact of Jewish immigrants on life in the modern United States. At the heart of the book is an argument that the vast literature on white evangelicals is necessary but nowhere near sufficient to explain why Christianity is now so closely identified with Trumpian politics.

To be clear, Hollinger is not looking for more complexity in discussions of evangelicalism itself, which he paints, without a hint of irony, as a convenient refuge for racist white rubes. The problem, as he sees it, is that we have lost sight of how this supposedly retrograde faith developed in “dialectical relationship with another Protestantism whose adherents had more respect for modern science and were more willing to accept ethnoracial diversity.”

Hollinger proceeds with a salvage operation of his own, recounting a story of how, in the mid-20th century, ecumenical Protestants, drawing on the very best of the Enlightenment, forged a cosmopolitan, anti-racist faith that decisively changed the nation for the better. As he has also argued elsewhere, oft-maligned missionaries were in the vanguard. “The experience of living with peoples really different from themselves, much to their surprise, changed their understandings of themselves, of their country, and of humanity,” Hollinger writes.

Such voices carried into the boardrooms of ecumenical institutions like the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), which fought against draconian immigration restrictions and, in 1946, became the first large predominantly white organization to condemn Jim Crow. In the 1950s and 1960s, many ecumenical Protestants celebrated as the movement coalescing around Martin Luther King Jr.—“literally one of their own,” Hollinger asserts—won historic civil rights breakthroughs.

Far from indulging in self-congratulation, leading ecumenical figures such as John Bennett, Harvey Cox, and William Stringfellow urged their fellow churchgoers to reckon with their complicity in a variety of social evils. These calls for self-interrogation rang out even as the National Council of Churches (successor to the FCC) pressed onward in pursuit of social justice, championing everything from Palestinian liberation to grape boycotts in support of the United Farm Workers.

So how on earth did we get from there to here? Anyone who wants to show how American Christianity became so (in)famously right-wing must account, Hollinger rightly contends, for the precipitous decline of this erstwhile ecumenical juggernaut. Faulty explanations abound. Some evangelical triumphalists continue to confuse correlation and causation, citing ecumenical churches’ shrinking rolls as clear evidence of the defectiveness of their theology.

(This argument has been harder to make ever since Southern Baptists started hemorrhaging members; but the notion that popularity is a reliable barometer of faithfulness had always seemed hard to square, in any case, with the gospel injunction in Matthew 7:13, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.”)

Here and elsewhere, Hollinger advances a more nuanced case. The evangelical eclipse of ecumenical Protestantism sprung, in part, from brass-tacks matters such as divergent birth rates. Whereas evangelical women had 2.4 children on average, their ecumenical counterparts—who were more likely to embrace the new professional opportunities on offer—averaged only 1.6.

But no single factor looms as large in Hollinger’s story as the way that the “ecumenical elite” navigated the social and cultural tumult of the 1960s. He likens their prophetic leadership to Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one which LBJ made knowing, as he ruefully declared, “We have lost the South for a generation.”

In the case of ecumenical Protestantism, too, courage and wisdom came at great cost. “Liberalizing church leaders were pushing their campaign too far and too fast for some of their older members,” Hollinger writes, “but not far and fast enough for many young people who were attentive to the cultural and political movements around them.”

Some disgruntled laypeople joined evangelical congregations, while many more drifted away altogether, becoming, like Hollinger himself, post-Protestants who cherished the humanitarian ideals they once learned at church but who no longer saw a need to show up on Sunday mornings. Ecumenical shepherds had arrived at the proverbial mountaintop but failed to bring their flocks with them.

Capacious and unwieldy

The fissures and fractures that Hollinger highlights help to make sense of ecumenical decline, though they also raise significant questions about the major frame of both his book and American Protestant history writ large. For more than 50 years now scholars have run with Martin Marty’s notion of a “two-party system” in American Protestantism. Marty’s particular vision of the parties—a “private” one emphasizing matters of personal sin and salvation, versus a “public” one more committed to social engagement—has not stuck.

But the basic narrative device has, whether it is a “churchly orientation” versus an “evangelical orientation”; “wildcat Christianity” versus “the civil religion of crude”; or, most commonly, evangelicals versus mainliners. Hollinger and the aforementioned evangelical historians may have decisively different senses of who counts as the sheep and who the goats in American Protestant history. But one thing all these scholars agree about is that the sheep and the goats can readily be separated.

The two-party paradigm is not without some merit, of course. There has in fact been much conflict between fundamentalists and modernists, between evangelicals and ecumenicals. And yet this framework glosses over the fact that the divides within the ecumenical camp, in particular, often ran just as deep. We see glimpses of this in Hollinger’s account, when he discusses the relative conservativism of Southern Protestants throughout the Civil Rights era; the devastating collapse of a proposed merger of ecumenical denominations in the early 1970s; and the bitter ecumenical fights over LGBTQ rights.

Yet the so-called mainline was even more ecumenical than Hollinger lets on. Theologically, politically, and otherwise, it was a remarkably capacious and therefore unwieldy tent. Ecumenicals disagreed over everything from the New Deal to women’s ordination, and from how to read the Bible to even very recent presidential politics.

Hollinger is so enamored with the progressive leaders that oversaw institutions such as Union Theological Seminary and The Christian Century that he underplays just how deeply conservative the ecumenical grassroots have sometimes been. One would never guess from his narrative that Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush all belonged to ecumenical congregations, let alone that a majority of white ecumenicals voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The truth is that the line between the Protestant party that Hollinger loves and the one he loathes has never been as bright in real life as it is in the pages of so many academic books.

And yet, anyone who cares about the past, present, and future of American Christianity will be challenged by this book, which like the entirety of Hollinger’s corpus is provocative in the best of ways. One can only hope that it provokes redoubled attention to an ecumenical Protestant tradition that is so much deeper and wider than popular caricatures have allowed. It has much to offer still today.

Heath W. Carter is an associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago.

- More from Heath W. Carter

News

Buffalo Survivors to Shooter: ‘You Will Not Escape the Fury of the Almighty’

Emily Belz

At Wednesday’s sentencing hearing, family members quote Scripture and evoke God’s vengeance and mercy.

Wayne Jones, the son of Tops grocery store shooting victim Celestine Chaney, pauses to collect himself as he makes a statement to the court during the sentencing of shooter Payton Gendron.

Derek Gee/The Buffalo News via AP, Pool

Kimberly Salter stood in court to face her husband’s killer for the first time on Wednesday. With a hand on her heart and wearing red that she said represented her husband’s shed blood, she simply read three passages from the Bible on God’s love and his vengeance.

“You will reap what you sow,” she said, quoting Galatians 6:7.

Salter was among a string of family members who shared Scripture in statements to Payton Gendron, the 19-year-old who killed 10 Black people and wounded three others at Tops grocery story in Buffalo last May. Police detained him before he could kill more.

Gendron made his racist motivations clear. He had posted a manifesto saying he wanted to preserve white power in the US, and he drove three hours to Buffalo to target a majority Black neighborhood. During the shooting, which he live-streamed, he apologized to one white person whom he shot and wounded by accident.

He pleaded guilty to murder and hate-motivated terrorism state charges in November last year.

The East Buffalo neighborhood where the mass shooting took place has exponentially more churches than grocery stores and a thick Christian community. Many of the victims, like security guard Aaron Salter, were believers and active in their churches.

At the sentencing hearing in New York state court, Kimberly Salter stated that “God is love, and he offers love to each and every one of us.” The widow recited John 3:16, but then she read the entirety of Psalm 35, an imprecatory prayer:

“Let those be put to shame and brought to dishonor who seek after my life. Let those be turned back and brought to confusion who plot my hurt. Let them be like chaff before the wind and let the angel of the Lord chase them. Let their way be dark and slippery. … All my bones shall say, “Lord who is like you? Delivering the poor from him to who is too strong for him. Yes, the poor and the needy from him who plunders them?”

As she finished the psalm, she said, “And so it is. This is the reading from God’s word. Thank you.” She sat.

The hearing was full of raw grief. One man lunged at Gendron during a family member’s statement, causing a brief scuffle where police escorted Gendron out of the courtroom. Police returned with Gendron after a few minutes and the hearing resumed.

The statements from victims’ family members drew from a gospel of justice, vengeance, and forgiveness.

Simone Crawley, the granddaughter of victim Ruth Whitfield, told the shooter, “We had a praying grandmother, who taught us that the battle is not yours, it is the Lord’s.”

Michelle Spight, who lost an aunt and a cousin in the shooting, read a statement from Pamela Young Pritchett, the daughter of victim Pearl Young. She mentioned that Young had been shot several times so that the family could not have an open casket at her funeral. Pritchett said she had to decide whether that last image of her mother’s disfigured face would “take up residency in my mind.”

“Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise,” she read from Philippians. “This will take up residency in my mind.”

Then Spight read a statement from Fred Morrison, whose brother Margus Morrison was killed. Morrison shared that his mother, since her son’s death, had a stroke and can’t speak.

Spight turned to face Gendron and read from Morrison’s statement: “There is One, Payton, that sees all, and you will not escape the fury of the Almighty. One Scripture is true in the Bible: ‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord. And he will repay.’” People clapped in the courtroom.

“I pray he is merciful, because I, too, need mercy,” she read on. “I pray he is merciful to let you live so you can be reminded of the innocent blood … behind your calculated, sinister, and demonic act, that caused my beloved brother to be snatched from our family. If you do not know God, Payton, I invite you to find him. Because you are going to need him. With deep sorrow, Fred Morrison, brother of Margus Morrison.”

Others also quoted the “vengeance is mine” Bible verse. Wayne Jones, the son of victim Celestine Chaney, said he had come across the footage of the shooting: “I watched you shoot her once, reload, and shoot her again.”

“You have to live with this one, bro, just as I have to live with this every day,” said Jones, who was wearing a cross necklace. “One day I hope you find it in your heart to apologize to those ten families … You don’t even know Black people that much to hate them. You learned this on the internet.”

Some spoke about forgiveness but in measured terms.

“I hope you do pray for forgiveness,” said Tamika Harper, the niece of victim Geraldine Talley. “You know, not forgiving, I’d be blocking my own blessing. Do I hate you? No. Do I want you to die? No, I want you stay alive, and think about this every day of your life. Think about my family and the other nine families that you have destroyed forever. I’m going to pray for you, and I want everyone to pray for all the families, that we can get through this. Right now, I feel like my life will never be the same.”

Another Talley family member said he forgave the gunman “not for your sake, but for mine.”

Zeneta Everhart’s son Zaire Goodman was shot in the neck but survived. He continues to face ongoing medical issues as well as trauma. Everhart said she won’t forgive because that “puts this tragedy in the laps of the victims and neither I nor my son will accept the responsibility for this terroristic act.” She said the shooter is the one who will “need to ask for forgiveness.”

And some just offered anger.

“I’m not going to be nice,” said Barbara Massey Mapps, the sister of victim Katherine Massey. “You killed my sister … I want to personally choke you.”

“I’m sad and I hate you,” said Deja Brown, the daughter of Andre Mackneil, who was buying a birthday cake for his 3-year-old son when he was killed. “I will never forgive you. It wasn’t my dad’s time to go. Who are you to think you control that?”

Gendron, who cried at one point in the hearing, did stand and give a statement apologizing: “I cannot express how much I regret all the decisions I made leading up to my actions on May 14. I did a terrible thing that day. I shot and killed people because they were Black. Looking back now I can’t believe I actually did it. I believed what I read online and acted out of hate … I do not want anyone to be inspired by me and what I did.”

Someone in the courtroom began screaming, wailing, and crying during his statement, yelling that he didn’t mean what he was saying.

Judge Susan Eagan sentenced Gendron to life in prison without the possibility of parole. New York does not have the death penalty.

“There are no mitigating factors to be considered,” said Eagan.

He faces additional federal charges including the possibility of the death penalty.

- More from Emily Belz

Theology

‘Honoring’ Your Father and Mother Isn’t Always Biblical

Karen Wong

Filial piety has damaged many parent-child relationships. But Christian families can learn where Confucian culture ends and Paul’s parenting practices begin.

Scene from "Illustrations of the Classic of Filial Piety", depicting a son kneeling before his parents.

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Image: WikiMedia Commons

Recently, a primary school in Hong Kong asked its students to kneel and serve tea to their mothers and fathers as a gesture of filial piety, a Confucian-inspired attitude of respect and service toward parents. While tea ceremonies are often performed by Chinese brides for their future in-laws, the school’s instructions suggested this might also be a worthy practice for children to direct toward their own parents.

The school’s decision drew significant attention and pushback from Hong Kongers, many of whom perceived the exercise as a way to compel their children to unconditionally follow authority. Since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, numerous parents have consciously tried to avoid raising their children to blindly follow authority—something they believe the Chinese government would desire. Others argued that forcing students into a subservient position was a sign that the administration was trying to encourage unconditional obedience from its students.

The school’s principal defended her public institution’s instruction apologetically, claiming that the practice was in line with the fifth commandment to “Honor your father and mother.”

Many Christian schools and churches in Hong Kong, where I was born and raised, have long used Scripture to justify Confucian teaching—even when these teachings have led to heretical conclusions. Few examine the difference between Christian instruction to honor parents and traditional Chinese filial piety.

But does the Chinese understanding of filial piety really mean exactly the same as the biblical description of honoring parents? And can an emphasis on obeying the fifth commandment overlook or even rationalize parent-child relationships characterized by contention, pain, disrespect, and suffering?

What’s more, Hong Kong leaders increasingly invoke filial piety as an argument for offering them our unquestioning support. Figuring out where Chinese culture ends and the Bible’s directions begin when it comes to supporting those in authority not only will affect our parent-child relationships—it will also help us know how to live as godly citizens in an imperfect world.

‘Reflexively obedient’

In a traditional Chinese family, filial piety dictates that parents have complete authority over their children. Mothers and fathers raise their sons and daughters to respect them and devote themselves to them unquestioningly. This arrangement continues even after parents die, as children are still expected to honor their elders.

This teaching has guided and maintained the structure of Chinese families, workplaces, nations, and culture for hundreds of years. In Christianity, the Bible says that “love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Pet. 4:8). For those living within a Confucian worldview, filial piety could almost cover all the bad deeds a person does.

In my experience, a killer could almost win the public’s sympathy if he was “filial” enough toward his parents. People might say that deep down, he isn’t a bad person but instead was lost and made some wrong life choices.

As recently as 2019, one journal article argued that “filial piety supports warmth, love, harmony, and close family ties, and thus has a beneficial effect on personal growth and interpersonal relationships.” This may be true for some, but I have observed filial piety bury many people’s dreams and cause much harm to children whose parents may cross boundaries in their marriages or parenting choices.

“Many adults, even middle-aged people, are reflexively obedient to their parents’ unreasonable demands. They are powerless to resist such demands,” wrote Hong Kong journalist Vivian Tam on Facebook after the tea ceremony incident. “They would never say no to the older generation, even if it affects the relationship between husband and wife. They would never say that kneeling to pour tea to parents is a step backward. Even if we don’t kneel to our parents physically, we are psychologically kneeling many times.”

To oblige the wishes of their parents, some children end up making extreme sacrifices. I have seen children end their own marriages because their parents disliked the spouses and they found it easier to placate their parents than to stop them from abusing their households.

Sadly, even though we Chinese thirst for family harmony, we often know only how to use parental authority to compel our children to obey us.

As Tam noted, parents rarely examine their own authority and have no concept of emotional boundaries between family members. Consequently, children cannot grow up independently, and the family as a whole cannot fulfill the role God gave it at creation.

Paul’s words for parents

While Confucius sees the parents as the head of the family, the Bible teaches us that this position of responsibility is the Lord’s. When Paul discusses the order of the family in Ephesians 6, he says to the children, “Obey your parents in the Lord” (v. 1), and to the parents, “Bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (v. 4). Scripture instructs both the children and the parents to obey the Lord. But nowhere does the Bible teach that parents’ requirements are equal to the Lord’s commands. Parents, after all, are humans who make mistakes.

Unlike filial piety’s child-subordinate-to-parent relationship, Paul envisions a mutual relationship here. Younger children may need to listen to their parents at home, but parents should know that their authority over their children is God-given. Their power does not reign supreme; they are ultimately accountable to God.

In Colossians 3:20–21, Paul writes, “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.” The first part of Paul’s commands may almost sound like traditional Chinese parental advice. But his subsequent words check the idea of parents being the absolute authority on what might be best for their children.

Parental authority may be for a child’s protection and best interest, but parents should be careful not to justify every act of authority without considering the boundaries and feelings of their children. If believers today emphasize only their children’s obedience without reflecting on parental authority and responsibility, they are actually reading Confucian concepts into the Bible.

“Parent officials”

So how again did a traditional activity spark such a public outcry?

Beginning with Confucius, filial piety has always extended beyond the family out to people’s relationship to the ruling officials. For hundreds of years, Chinese people have accorded respect to local magistrates in a manner reminiscent of children obeying their parents, even calling them “parent officials.” Until several years ago, Hong Kongers referred to the Beijing government as “grandpa.”

However, social and political incidents in Hong Kong in recent years have changed the public’s feelings toward the mainland regime. Authoritarian rule continues to grow in Hong Kong. Voices critical of the government have grown weaker in recent years. The middle school gen ed curriculum for independent (critical) thinking has been cut in half.

Is the primary school’s insistence on filial piety and obedience actually one small step toward encouraging the next generation to unquestioningly submit to those in power?

Some scholars of Chinese literature have pointed out that Confucius did not advocate unconditional obedience. Instead, he taught that when children saw their parents making mistakes, they should try their best to persuade them—and that courtiers should treat kings in the same way.

However, the social view of Confucianism has long been used by successive Chinese regimes as an instrument for the rulers. Our culture has long framed our unconditional obedience to authorities as a virtue, one that has deeply penetrated the marrow of the Chinese people. But as Chinese believers who recognize that our values come from God, not from the nation or cultural tradition, we ought to examine our tradition and its influence in the light of God’s Word.

Neither practicing blind obedience nor demanding the same from others in our lives is godly. Instead, as the Bible reveals to us, it is only by submitting to one another in the Lord, thinking and acting from one another’s perspectives, and being wise to the roles and boundaries in our relationships that we can build and deepen those relationships and—whether related by blood or not—become a real family to each other.

Karen Wong lives in Hong Kong and loves to write. She is a believer who struggles with parenthood, thinks theologically, and constantly hopes in the gospel.

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TGC’s Keller Center Is for Apologists Without All the Answers

Interview by Megan Fowler

Executive director Collin Hansen: In a post-Christian context, the church is challenged to collaborate—and humbly pray—for new strategies in its witness.

Tim Keller

Rachel Martin / Courtesy of Redeemer City to City

When Tim Keller arrived in New York City in 1989 to plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church, about 30 percent of Manhattan residents claimed no religion.

In 2023, about 26 percent of people in Indiana identify with no particular religion. The numbers are around the same or higher in states across the US—Nevada and New York, Colorado and Wisconsin.

The country’s disaffiliation and apathy to faith underscores the urgent need for cultural apologetics, according to Collin Hansen, editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and executive director of its new initiative named for TGC cofounder Tim Keller.

The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, which launched last week, isn’t out to replicate the 72-year-old pastor but to equip leaders to also think deeply about how to present the gospel to the post-Christian context they find themselves in.

“This is not about teaching everyone to think what Tim Keller thinks, but this is about helping people to think the way he learned to think about his culture and applying that to our own day,” said Hansen.

This next generation of ministers and apologists have a big challenge before them. The Keller Center has gathered 26 fellows to collaborate and generate resources for the church. Among the first is Hansen’s spiritual biography on Keller—Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation—which released last week.

TGC says it has also commissioned “the largest-ever survey of people who have left the church” and plans to share the results through its forthcoming book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? The book is written by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge.

In addition to books , the center will offer podcasts, online cohorts, long-form essays, and social media content. The resources are geared toward keeping Christians from leaving the church; helping the church be a welcoming place for secular, skeptical neighbors; and preparing Christians to offer a winsome witness to the world.

Keller, who has battled pancreatic cancer since 2020 and is still undergoing treatment, will work behind the scenes, continuing to mentor and encourage some of the fellows involved—as he has done with those serving at TGC over the years.

Hansen talked with Christianity Today about the importance of establishing moral credibility in apologetics and how The Keller Center can strengthen the witness of the church. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where did this idea for a center for cultural apologetics come from?

The original idea goes all the way back to 2019. It came from The Gospel Coalition’s president Julius Kim. Julius is the first transition of leadership at The Gospel Coalition, and one of the things that he discussed was honoring our cofounders with institutions that would explicitly carry on their legacy.

What Tim Keller is so widely known for and what he has really imprinted on The Gospel Coalition has been his efforts to do cultural apologetics, to apply the gospel to all of life. That idea started in 2019. We’ve been working on it with the board at The Gospel Coalition, and of course now we’re seeing it in 2023.

Tim Keller writes and preaches, but he is famously uninterested in building his own brand. How did The Gospel Coalition get him to attach his name to this endeavor?

It’s not something that he responded to favorably when Julius Kim first reached out to ask about that. But the plain fact is when you try to explain cultural apologetics to somebody, it’s pretty complicated. When you say, “We’re trying to help a new generation do in our day what Tim Keller had done in his day,” that makes sense. It’s a much more straightforward way of being able to identify the kind of work that we’re trying to do and the kind of work we think is urgently necessary for all of the church to do today.

How do you describe cultural apologetics beyond saying “doing what Tim Keller did”?

We’re not trying to go back and do what Tim Keller did but to learn the same sort of perspectives that we can apply to this day. Here’s one of the principal ways to put it: In 1989 when Tim started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, about 30 percent or so of Manhattan was “no religion.” I’m here in Indianapolis today, and Indiana today is about 26 percent no religion. More or less the same dynamics that were true of secular Manhattan at the time are true of almost the entire country today.

Manhattan is also quite different than it was at that time. It is going to be up to a new generation in Manhattan not to go back and do what Tim Keller did in 1989 but to figure things out for themselves at a time when hostility toward the gospel and toward Christians has substantially increased across sectors and the bigger problem is actually apathy toward the gospel.

One of the biggest problems we face across the landscape in the West today is simply not caring at all about the things of God. That is a problem that no one has solved that we need to engage the church in working on solving together before the Lord. It’s going to be a practical exercise, an academic exercise, a theological exercise, an integration of faith and work exercise. It’s going to require all of us.

How do you hope the church will be strengthened by The Keller Center?

I went to seminary. Seminaries are wonderful. I cochair the advisory board of a seminary, and I teach a seminary class on cultural apologetics. If I am teaching the same class on cultural apologetics in 20 years, something will have gone horribly wrong. The issues change so much.

What does that say for somebody who 20 years from now will only be in the middle way of his or her ministry but took a class in seminary? The point is we can’t rely simply on even the best institutions to do this work because the culture changes too quickly.

We need to be able to use the tools available to us for ongoing education, and it’s going to happen at multiple levels. It has to happen at the level of those who are teaching the teachers, our fellows, people who are engaged primarily in teaching and training others. It’s going to happen at the level of pastors and other church leaders—elders, deacons, small group leaders. That’s where our online, interactive cohorts come in. It’s also going to have to happen at the level of parents; that’s where a lot of our podcasts and essays are going to help them.

But then it’s going to have to happen at the level of our kids, and that’s where things like new catechisms and responses, Instagram reels—that’s where those are going to have to come into play. At all those different levels we’re looking to come behind the church or alongside church leaders and strengthen them in the callings they already exercise, by God’s grace.

https://twitter.com/TGC/status/1622943273252974592

How do you envision Keller being involved in the center in its early stages?

With [Keller’s] pancreatic cancer, who knows what tomorrow will bring? My attitude as the executive director, and working closely with Tim on this, has always been, as much as Tim is able to and wants to help in terms of words of encouragement or suggestions or whatever he wants, that’s fine. But it was designed to be something that would carry on after him. I hope he’s able to give us encouragement, but Tim is a pretty hands-off leader in general. When he finds people he trusts, he pretty much lets them go.

This is not a ministry to perpetuate Tim’s specific works. This is a ministry to help perpetuate the ideas and strategies for the next generation in ways that he’s helped us to think over the years. This is not about teaching everyone to think what Tim Keller thinks, but this is about helping people to think the way he learned to think about his culture and now applying that to our own day all over different places around the West.

How do you envision The Keller Center being different from other training out there in the world of apologetics?

I think that the major shift that we are undergoing in apologetics is twofold. Number one is that the moral credibility of the church, of apologists themselves, has to be foregrounded. There’s been a lot of breach of trust of the church, breach of trust in high-profile apologists themselves. There has to be a level of collaboration and encouragement and accountability that happens among these leaders and institutions that will encourage them in godly patterns.

One of the things that we made a nonnegotiable about the character of The Keller Center [fellows and staff] has been attitudes of humility, which are what any teacher of the gospel is called to by Jesus himself but has not always been characteristic of leading defenders of the faith. It is essential that we be bearing witness to Christ not only in what we say but in what we do and in who we are. One of our fellows is Michael Kruger. His work Bully Pulpit might not be what a lot of people think of as cultural apologetics, but insofar as it affects the moral witness of the church, it absolutely is.

Number two is that a lot of apologetics operates within a basic Enlightenment framework of certain expected patterns of intellectual argumentation and rational discourse. The challenge is we’re seeing a lot of fraying at the edges of the Enlightenment. We’ve seen a lot of major, high-level social criticism of the Enlightenment not being able to hold together in a post-Christendom environment. A lot of the inspiration for the work that we’re doing comes from the social criticism of Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor.

Our goal is through cultural apologetics to get underneath the surface-level conversations that so many people are having right now about faith to get down to the deeper social structures, or what Tim and others would call a “thick” view of sin rather than a thin one. We’re hoping to help inspire the church to think deeper.

Now that the announcement is out there, have you seen misunderstandings or misinterpretations of The Keller Center that you’d like to clear up?

There’s always going to be assumptions, confusion, jaundiced views of things. It’s part of the way our internet culture operates, so it’s not anything that’s new or different. Bottom line: The proof is in the pudding with these kinds of things. If you do good and godly work before the face of Christ, then hopefully people will enjoy it, benefit from it, and want to join up. If we don’t do good and godly work, if we’re doing things with the wrong motives, with a sinful heart, then what we do shouldn’t last. The Lord should judge, and the Lord should destroy the work. So we will see.

Our biggest attitude is that this has to be an effort of prayer. If we’re not coming together before one another and praying for each other and the church, praying desperately for God’s help, then we shouldn’t succeed. One of the first things our fellows did is come together online to begin to confess to one another, to ask for prayer, to hold online prayer meetings for one another. That wasn’t orchestrated by me or Tim Keller or our program director, Michael Graham. That was just a spontaneous response of the need that these fellows were identifying. I trust that’s the most we can do: Come before the Lord and pray and try to be humble before the Lord and others.

I think one of the biggest problems that apologists have made is they have acted like they have all the answers. For this situation today, we don’t have the answers. That’s why we’re doing this: because we need help. We need help from the past, ultimately from God and his Scriptures, and other people in the church. This is a collaborative effort.

If apologetics is going to be useful in this generation, it’s going to have to be led through humility and through prayer. And if I might be so bold as to say, having written the book about Tim Keller, that’s really what has characterized his life. Tim Keller is not someone who thinks he always got things right. I think that’s one of the things that stands out about the book and one reason it’s easy to work with him on a project like this.

- More from Interview by Megan Fowler

Theology

Write a New Hymn unto the Lord

Benjamin Vincent

Hymn writing should be a spiritual practice for everyday saints, not just for worship professionals.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Unsplash

Anyone who has grown up in or around the church is likely familiar with “hymn stories”—the stories that surround the composition of some of our favorite songs of worship.

How many times have you heard the life of Horatio Spafford recounted before singing “It Is Well with My Soul”? How often has the slave-trading past of John Newton been told to give rich reality to the sweet strains of “Amazing Grace” (which is just over 250 years old!)?

The same can be said for number of other famous hymn writers throughout Christian history. We love to tell hymn stories because they remind us that every hymn is a prayer and that every prayer begins from the real faith of a real man or woman seeking God.

For the same reason, there has been a resurgence of interest in seeking God through various spiritual practices, especially in recent decades.

Popular books like Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love have challenged believers to consider the role of disciplined, habit-forming practices in spiritual growth and development. As a young Christian myself, I have watched my peers pick up practices like journaling, lectio divina, and prayers of examen as they seek to consistently practice the presence of God.

In the same way, I believe writing hymns should play a role in spiritual formation. And as I reflect on the role that hymn writing has played in my own life, I find that it has become a kind of spiritual practice—not merely an artistic enterprise but a simple and consistent way of responding to God.

I suspect that this was the case for many renowned hymn writers. Fanny Crosby wrote more than 9,000 hymns over the course of her life, and Charles Wesley wrote nearly as many. In Wesley’s own words (in a hymn, no less), he wrote, “My heart is full of Christ, and longs this glorious matter to declare!”

It seems to me that this kind of output must be the result of hymn writing as a habit of spiritual life rather than an occasional creative project. The best and truest hymns arise from a sincere relationship with Jesus—or, as Fr. George Rutler puts it in his book of hymn stories, “Christ makes the soul sing in the brightest and best way.”

I wrote my first hymn at an evangelistic youth camp, where I was preparing to give a sermon on the Resurrection. That’s when I got the news: Halfway around the world, a truck lost control at high speed and struck a car carrying a 19-year-old girl and her father. Both were killed. That girl was my friend and a remarkable example of Christian faith and character.

It’s hard to describe the feelings caused by such a jarring juxtaposition. As I sat preparing to encourage young people with the undying hope found in Jesus, a dear Christian friend was torn away by death.

I put my preparation aside, wandered by the lake, and wept. Disoriented and frustrated with the world and even with God, I pulled out my phone, opened a new note, and began to write.

I wouldn’t consider myself an artist or a poet, though I had a basic familiarity with meter and rhyme schemes. More importantly, I had spent my life hearing and singing hymns. It was primarily the influence of those sweet old songs that shaped my writing. After half an hour of crying, praying, and writing, I put my phone away. It felt as though a kind of partial closure had been reached in a conversation with God.

Now, I am under no illusions that my little hymn was a masterpiece. Strictly speaking, I’m not even sure it could be called a hymn, since it did not yet have any music. But I know that my hymn was one of the sincerest prayers I have ever prayed. I know that, in writing it, I was truly sitting in the presence of God—or, perhaps more accurately, wrestling with him.

From then on, I became convinced that the writing of hymns deserves a place among the primary spiritual practices in the life of a believer, alongside other forms of prayer and meditation on Scripture.

Like any other spiritual practice, this kind of hymn writing requires discipline and growth but is richly rewarding in return. Whenever I take the time to turn my confused feelings into a hymn, I feel doubly blessed by the immediate fruit of that time of creative prayer and by the tangible reminder provided by the finished hymn. It is rather like building an altar in the wilderness, both as a place of present worship and later as a reminder of God’s past provision.

So how do you go about writing a hymn?

First, I should clarify that I am not using the word hymn in a musically technical sense. There are, of course, certain characteristics that have historically set hymns apart from other music. Hymns are often firmly rooted in the words of Scripture. They frequently build around a repeating melody joined to numerous verses. Hymns may lack a repeating chorus or refrain, choosing instead to lean on the repetition of the melody to provide an anchor for the song.

But your hymn doesn’t need to include all those standard characteristics. My own hymns often diverge from some of these hymnal hallmarks, though they can be helpful as a guideline or starting point. My goal in hymn writing is not to follow a particular poetic convention, though I may stumble across one as I write.

Even still, the idea of writing a hymn can be daunting. Where would you even begin? You may not even like poetry at all! The good news is that you do not need to be a great poet to write a hymn—first, because your hymn does not need to be “great,” and second, because many of the sweetest hymns are the simplest.

When I say that you should write a hymn, I am not asking you to craft the next “Amazing Grace.” Yes, Crosby wrote over 9,000 hymns—but how many have you heard? How many do you regularly sing? “Blessed Assurance” is beautiful and timeless, but it is only one of thousands of lesser-known hymns. I would hazard a guess that most of the hymns of history have been known only to their authors. Some may be shared with a few close friends. Very few ever need to become hymnal “chart toppers.”

Furthermore, many of the sweetest and most beloved hymns of the church are exceptionally simple poetry. It would be hard to call “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” a groundbreaking piece of English literature, but it would be equally hard to deny the spiritual nourishment it has provided to countless believers! When you sit down to write a hymn, you are simply sitting down to write out a prayer, rooted in the junction between biblical truth and daily life.

To quote Fanny Crosby on her hymn writing, “I should sit alone … praying God to give me the thoughts and the feelings wherewith to compose my hymn. … It may seem a little old-fashioned, always to begin one’s work with prayer; but I never undertake a hymn without first asking the good Lord to be my inspiration.”

Ultimately, hymn writing forces you to speak slowly and methodically to God as you frame your prayer in rhyme and meter. It has often been said that the beauty of poetry comes from its self-imposed limits. Every word must be selected carefully, weighed, and contemplated before being placed gently into the larger tapestry of the hymn. In my experience, this produces a particularly thoughtful kind of prayer.

Of course, a natural question could be posed here: Doesn’t a hymn require music? All I’ve really described so far is the composition of spiritual poetry! Fair enough. I must admit that I completely lack the skills necessary to write stirring melodies for my own hymns.

That problem can be addressed in a few ways. For one thing, many of my hymns simply lack music. Yet I do not think of them as poems—I think of them as hymns that await a melody. Perhaps, one day, I or someone else will add one. For others, I set my words to folk tunes that suit my meter. One of my favorite personal hymns is written to fit the melody of the old Scottish tune “Loch Lomond.”

Finally, I have sent some hymns to friends with a talent for composition and asked them to adapt my lyrics to a melody. I consider this to be a beautiful example of the body of Christ at work in worship. And many of history’s most beloved hymns came to life in this way, from “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” to “Silent Night.”

My point is simply that you do not need to be a proficient poet or a capable composer to begin hymn writing as a spiritual discipline. You simply need to pray, slowly and methodically, adding a little rhyme and rhythm as you go. Of course, it might be worth your time to read a simple book on poetry—I still remember being helped by Suzanne Rhodes’s The Roar on the Other Side during my years as a student.

But if you’ve ever read the Bible and you’ve ever sung a hymn, you have the tools you need to shape your prayers with some rhyming and timing. Before dismissing it as something you can’t do, I would urge you to try it. Pick a piece of Scripture, receive from it the comfort and promises of God, and turn them back into a simple poem. Such an exercise can be far easier and sweeter than you might expect.

I stand in firm agreement with the words of Vatican II: “The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art.” It is fitting that hymnals have so often sat alongside Bibles in the backs of pews: In one we find of the Word of God for his people, and in the other we find the words of people responding to God.

Each generation of the church can add to this ever-growing record of prayers, praises, and pleas. Regardless of whether my contributions or yours are ever sung by a congregation, it is a tremendous blessing to join one’s voice to the ancient choir of prayerful praise.

In a sermon entitled “The Memorable Hymn,” Charles Spurgeon urges believers to sing many hymns of different sorts, noting that “perhaps no one hymn will quite meet the sentiments of all; and while we would not write a hymn for you, we would pray the Holy Spirit to write now the spirit of praise upon your hearts.”

And that, dear Christian, is why you really should consider writing a hymn.

Benjamin Vincent is a pastor to youth and young adults at Journey of Faith Bellflower in Bellflower, California, and a teacher of history and theology at Pacifica Christian High School in Newport Beach, California.

- More from Benjamin Vincent

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Hualong Medical Station

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Dave Eubank, director of Free Burma Rangers, currently in Karenni State

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A salvage operation

Capacious and unwieldy

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‘Reflexively obedient’

Paul’s words for parents

“Parent officials”

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